The title was taken from a 1976 John Carpenter movie (the one before ``Halloween'') about a gang assault on a police station, of which the most memorable feature was that all the gang members were armed with guns with silencers. So instead of ``BLAM! BLAM!'' all you heard was ``pht pht.'' The makers of the new version did not retain that conceit, producing a movie that's loud, loud, loud. And absurd.

Another thing you should be prepared for is that the whole movie takes place over one snowy night in Detroit, except that this is movie snow, and its manifest fakeness is kind of distracting.

But anyway, to the story: Precinct 13 is being closed, its last night of operation being New Year's Eve. Only two cops and a secretary are on duty, cleaning up.

Then a bus pulls up with four prisoners aboard, including Marion Bishop (Laurence Fishburne), Detroit's No. 1 drug dealer. They must be housed overnight because the blizzard makes travel impossible. Two cops are with them.

Before long, the station is under siege, and those two cops are the first to die. Who's out there? About half the police department's vice squad, determined to kill Bishop so he can't finger them for corruption.

Trapped with Bishop (and in this cartoonish movie) are Ethan Hawke, Brian Dennehy, Drea de Matteo, Ja Rule, John Leguizamo, Aisha Hinds and Maria Bello, all making the best of a bad situation.

Movies like this require what's called the ``willing suspension of disbelief.'' And I'm ready to do that, probably more than most people, because I really try to enjoy everything I watch. But ``Assault on Precinct 13'' makes it too difficult, even for me. There's no way such a battle could go on, involving dozens of cops using high-tech military equipment, including a helicopter, without somebody at another precinct catching wind of it.